Knowledge Based Obligation.
Eric Pacuit
Stanford University
Deontic Logic goes back to Ernst Mally's 1926 work,
Grundgesetze des Sollens: Elemente der Logik des Willens, where he presented axioms for the notion `p ought to be the case'.
Epistemic Logic goes back to Hintikka's 1962 work, Knowledge and
Belief: The Logic of Two Notions, in which he proposed formal logics of knowledge and belief. Both fields have developed a great deal (witness the DEON and TARK conferences). However, there has been relatively little work combining the two notions of knowledge (belief)
with the notion of obligation. I will present a recent paper which
uses a history based semantics that enables us to represent how information is transmitted among agents and how knowledge and obligations change over time as a result of communications.